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Gong.io, the leading SaaS company in the fast-growing category of Conversation Intelligence for sales teams, announced on Sunday a $20 million Series A1 round.

The investment round was led by existing investors: Norwest Venture Partners and CheckPoint cofounder Shlomo Kramer. They were joined by new investors: Wing Venture Capital and NextWorld Capital, Peter Wagner, founding partner at Wing Venture Capital, and Ben Fu, general partner at NextWorld Capital, will join as board observers.

Serial entrepreneurs Amit Bendov and Eilon Reshef cofounded Gong.io in 2015. While managing some of the most successful hyper-growth start-ups, they realized that most companies don’t understand why their sales teams aren’t meeting their targets.

Gong.io leverages artificial intelligence and machine learning to dramatically change the way salespeople conduct calls. The company’s patented technology automatically records sales calls and video conferences, transcribes them, and then uses AI and machine learning to analyze hundreds of data parameters within each call. By analyzing sales call patterns and matching them to business outcomes, Gong.io provides actionable insights to salespeople and sales leaders so that they can improve their performance and win many more deals.

The new funding will further support Gong.io’s impressive growth. It has been more than doubling its revenue for four consecutive quarters and is already helping thousands of salespeople optimize more than $1 billion of revenue at companies like Act-On, SalesLoft, Sisense, Greenhouse and Zywave. The technological innovation and impact of its product were recently recognized by Gartner, which named Gong.io a 2017 Cool Vendor in CRM Sales.

“Hardly a year since our first sales and it clearly feels like we’re on a rocket ship. Conversation Intelligence is the biggest shift in sales since CRM was introduced,” said Amit Bendov, Gong.io CEO and cofounder. “We are humbled by the overwhelmingly positive customer feedback we’re receiving and are already working on a very ambitious product road map to continue the innovation. We will use the latest round of funding to hire dozens of developers and researchers to expand our product and to step up our sales, marketing and support activities.”

Several investors commented about their decision to back Gong.io and its Conversation Intelligence platform: “We have been very impressed with Gong.io’s rapid growth and stellar execution of their original vision and we are thrilled to increase our investment,” said Dror Nahumi, general partner at Norwest Venture Partners. “Gong.io is taking a strong lead in a whitespace category that will grow.”

“The conversations a company has with its customers are strategic data assets that have been untapped for far too long,” said Peter Wagner, founding partner of Wing Venture Capital. “For the first time, Gong.io turns these customer conversations into productive intelligence resources with profound implications across the enterprise.”

“Gong.io is the perfect convergence of next generation SaaS, Big Data, AI and Machine Learning – applied to conversations that directly impact sales, the lifeblood of any company,” said Ben Fu, general partner at NextWorld Capital. “We see Conversation Intelligence as the future of AI-powered sales and we’re excited to help Gong.io dominate this new enterprise category around the globe.”

Building business bridges with the PA

Palestinian hi-tech professionals from ASAL Technologies in the Palestinian Authority, working in partnership with Israeli Mellanox Technologies, will arrive in Israel for a unique event that will present Rawabi’s hi-tech industry and opportunities at hand to leading Israeli companies.

For the first time ever, as part of a unique collaboration between ASAL Technologies, Mellanox Technologies and Israel Start-Up Network, Palestinian hi-tech professionals will arrive at Mellanox offices for a unique event presenting possibilities for software development in the PA to representatives of leading companies in Israel.

This event will be another step forward in the four-year long partnership between ASAL Technologies, that provides software development, professional services, and business process outsourcing services, and Mellanox Technologies, a supplier of end-to-end interconnect solutions for data center servers and storage systems. As part of this joint venture, more than 100 ASAL Technologies employees, working from Rawabi, handle design, development, verification and quality assurance.

The event will include a panel of experts from the Israeli and Palestinian hi-tech industries, discussing the Palestinian hi-tech sector, achievements, challenges and future potential, as well as their experience working with ASAL Technologies. They will also discuss Rawabi’s status as the first Palestinian planned city and a new tech hub in the region, enabling expanded collaboration opportunities.

It will be moderated by Jennifer Atala, CEO at Atala Consulting. The panelists will include: Amit Krig, VP of Software at Mellanox Technologies, Sari Taha, Tech Hub program manager at Rawabi City, Ibrahim Tannira, Sales and Marketing manager at ASAL Technologies, Yaron Sheffer, director of Security Technologies Product Development at Intuit and Dude Slama, senior director for Cloud and Networking Solutions at Mellanox Technologies.

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